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andylim writes "Plans for a universal mobile phone charger have been approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations body. The charger has a micro-USB port at the connecting end, using technology similar to what is commonly used with digital cameras. It is not compulsory for manufacturers to adopt the new chargers, but the ITU says that some have already signed up to it. 'We are planning to launch the universal charger internationally during the first half of 2010,' Aldo Liguori, spokesperson for Sony Ericsson told the BBC."

What many forget is that the dock connector was not originally a USB solution, it was a firewire connector. This was because USB was so slow. My first player was a USB device and I hardly ever changed the music because it took forever to load.

Of course Apple has left the firewire world, so there is no reason to keep the fancy connector except for backward compatibility and to earn licensing fees. I assume that the later will motivate them to maintain the standard, at least for while longer. I do suspe

In fact, the HTC models use a proprietary 11-pin connection that happens to be backwardly compatible with the 5-pin micro-USB. The extra 4 pins are for audio, presumably because providing a USB stack would be a bit expensive for a headset..

Well, Nokia uses the Micro USB connector. And Sony Ericsson seems to be on board as well.

Just by market share alone [wirelessweek.com] those two make up more than 45% of the world wide market for new phones.

Get any of LG, Samsung or Motorola to sign up for this, and you're looking at more than 50% of the market for new cell phones.

But even with 45% of the market for new phones, it's still a massive incentive for the rest of the market. You could end up with a situation where new phones don't come with a charger, and you pay maybe 10 bucks for a new one if you need it. After all, with 45% of new cell phones needing this kind og charger, that's a huge opportunity for selling them separately.

I, for one, would like to see something similar happen to laptops as well, even though my 95W power brick is over sized for a netbook, it'd be nice not to have to pay a minor fortune to find the right one.

Completely wrong. You will find such cables with any old external drive for a laptop floppy drive, digital camera, blackberry, small external mass storage devices, Blackberry and even nerf gun/rocket launchers.

After standardizing *on the micro connector, someone will need to look into standardizing *it.

Yes, reading the wikipedia page it seems that the micro socket is rated for many many more insertions than the older "mini" socket

On the other hand, I would prefer that my mobile phone in the future didn't have any kind of socket. I want to see induction charging where you just lay it on a charging plate (possibly with other devices at the same time) and just use Bluetooth or whatever for data connectivity.

Well, they did sell internet surveillance equipment to Iran and successfully lobbied for a law in Finland that allows them to spy on their employees. Nobody's perfect and Nokia happens to be into surveillance. Still one of the less appalling mobile phone manufacturers, though.

No, it's just that I didn't think the Google thing was as bad as some people here on/. thought, so because I didn't know much about this Nokia/Iran story, I was using that as a yardstick comparison so that I can judge whether this is as bad as some people think too.

Nokia's here in the UK are almost entirely still circular jacks, mostly 3.5mm jacks with a smattering of 2mm jacks. I found a lovely charger that's a 3.5mm with a 3.5-2mm adaptor and I'm making do with it. Still, if the fragile 2mm pin breaks like my last one, I'll definitely be craving a standardised USB one.

Funny, I was under the impression they'd been moving away from the larger jacks for some years. My last Nokia also had a micro USB port but it couldn't charge from it for some odd reason.

Since when does ICANN run the WWW ? (and what the heck is "The WWW" ? - No The internet is not *only* about HTML transiting over HTTP thank you..)

But this put aside, I don't think it is the role of the ITU to govern over anything like HTTP, HTML, the Domain Name System (which is only governed by ICANN up to the point where you pick their root servers as a hint).

ITU is about telecommunication. It describes how information gets from point A to point B - and NOT the actual payload.. For example,

obviously you haven't worked with the itu in the past. they had a whole replacement for the internet workedout. trees worth of documnets written in languages and metalanugages where the shift was not entirely clear. alljust to describe an ananlogue of tpc/ip

b) retarded protocols (H.323, where messages are formatted according to an hierarchy defined in 3+ different standards, and call initiation sequences have so many alternatives that it is common to have two certified H.323 endpoints refuse to talk to each other. Implementing H.323 involves thousands of lines of code. While SIP (a non-ITU protocol) uses text headers similar to email and http, can be understood from a single RFC and can be correctly implemented in a few hundred lines.)

c) favoring patented cash troll codecs such as G.729 instead of similar patent-free ones. (Meanwhile, a lot of international phone traffic is performed in roughly-uncompressed G.711, using 10x the bandwidth because the licensing fees of G.729 are outrageous)

That's ITU for you, and these people should be forbidden from publishing any standard whatsoever.

SIP a single RFC? Can you imagine the number of SIP related RFCs and associated drafts? SIP WAS simple, it is now a mess. Even if we restrict to RFC 3261, if you can asnwer the following questions you are already a MASTER in SIP:

- what is the difference between request URI and the "To" header? Are they redundant?- what is the difference between the "Contact" header, the "P-Asserted-Identity" header and the "From" header?- what is the loose routign mechanism and what is the relationship with the

Mostly agreed. Still, it is possible to write a SIP endpoint based on a couple of well delimited RFCs (SIP, authentication, RTP), while even decoding the hierarchy of an H.323 message is a mess.

As for the culture of writing in a language developers can't read, and charging for access to standards: if it depended on the ITU the Internet would not exist and sending bits across continents would be considered an expensive technological miracle, much like international phone calls 30 years ago.

This folks is one of the two UN organisations (both older than the UN) who could run the WWW better than ICANN

1. ICANN doesn't run the www.

2. ITU is incredibly internet-hostile. The ITU's vision of the internet is a closed network run by national telco monopolies where everything is charged for. If they had their way you'd be paying $10,000 for copies of each IETF document.

The closest to this is the humble car charger, but as far as I can tell, sadly airports and hotels I've been at don't have 12v sockets handy (maybe I didn't look hard enough and be wrong). There isn't always access to a car and in a lot of places, you don't exactly want to leave expensive electronics in one.

The plugs are annoying, but you can literally get a set for under ten bucks. It's usually not that hard to plan ahead and carry the one or two you will need for the countries you're visiting. Practically all phone chargers run on 100-240V, anywhere fom 50-60 Hz (and probably then some!) and all you need is the plug.

Because the UN was never given the power to mandate an electronic design. They can offer an opinion (recommendation) but that's it.

Nor should the UN make that grab for power, because once you go down that road, eventually the UN will start mandating what kind of roof you can install on your house. It's bad enough I have Congress telling me how much corn/potatoes I can or cannot grow in my own backyard. They were never granted that power under the Constitution, but since the mid-1930s they've exercised the power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [wikipedia.org]

What twisted your mind into thinking, a non-elected group, that is not even remotely connected to the constitutions of the countries in it, and is none of the 3 pillars of a government, would have any jurisdiction in those countries?

That would be totalitarian dictatorship. Plain and simple.

Additionally, where would you go, if that totalitarian global, all-encompassing dictatorship, would happen to not like your views and actions?? There would be not other country to flee to. The concept of asylum would cease to exist.

And you just talked about it, like it were something normal...I fear for this world...

It is really that big of deal? I have never really been bothered by a variety of Cell Phone chargers. I get a new phone every 3 or 4 years, my charger that comes with the phone usually lasts longer then the phone. The only charger I had problem with wasn't with the charger but stupid engineering by the part of Motorola where they made the connector on the phone not click in well and make it difficult to get a full charge as it will wiggle out after a few minutes. However even with standard phone chargers

One proposal was to put them in charge of the root name servers. It wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen.

It probably would be. Within a few years, you could say goodbye to any domain name connected to content that offended anyone or facilitated end-user VoIP. Domain-name registration would cost $1000 and would require thumbprints and photocopies of your passport.

Why this was tagged !important is beyond me. This only has plus points! It is a very important step in reducing carbon- and other needless emissions. Imagine how much this saves in copper and other materials! The price of phones and other appliances can go down a small bit because the consumer doesn't have to pay for a charger every time it buys a new one. Packages become smaller so shipping new phones costs less energy. Shops can store more phones in the same space, so the chance that the phone you want is out of stock will become smaller... I could go on and on. This is a giant leap for the environment and the consumer!

The price of phones and other appliances can go down a small bit because the consumer doesn't have to pay for a charger every time it buys a new one.

This assumes that the phone manufacturers will stop including a charger in every phone they sell.

Uh, just why did you think they were doing this? Most consumers will buy the official charger even if it costs three times as much... and usually, it's at least three times as good... original chargers usually outlast phones:p

It's not just the "something expensive in a small box", it's to prevent a customer from sneaking a small package into their pocket and walking out with it. It's a lot easier to see a bulging plastic package than something tiny that just wraps the device.

I have had 4 digital cameras that have failed after a couple of hundred insertions using mini-USB. I know people who have gone through 3 or 4 Playstation Dualshock 3 controllers as the socket damaged in the same way. The pins usually bend downwards.

The newer Micro-USB receptacles are designed to allow up to 10,000 cycles of insertion and removal between the receptacle and plug, compared to 500 for the standard USB and Mini-USB receptacle. This is accomplished by adding a locking device and by moving the leaf-spring connector from the jack to the plug, so that the most-stressed part is on the cable side of the connection. This change was made so that the connector on the (inexpensive) cable would bear the most wear instead of the micro-USB device.

Is this new standard water resistant? It has to be if it ever gets to military devices. I always though the Apple MAC power connector could easy be water resistant just by sealing the edges around where the connector meets the body during assembly. Just think, expanding that could have a universal connector for mobile devices that can survive a dunk in the pool or toilet.

'The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body...It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought 'Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?'...I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he'd probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing, work to a standard DC low-power supply.'

The wall-wart contains the circuitry that converts 110vac/240vac to low voltage DC. Killing the wall wart means that same circuitry goes into the device, meaning that devices will now be larger by the size of the wall wart.

More sensible would be to simply make everything charge via USB, as USB is already a low-power DC source, and most low power (say 10W and under) devices can be made to work from it. Future versions of USB could even be made to allow higher current delivery, allowing higher draw devices to

Manufacturers don't actually need to use a wall-wart as such. They could easily use a length of cable terminated by a normal plug, with the "wart" part of it at some point on the cable away from the socket.

That way, we wouldn't have that continual problem with running out of usable power outlets because of some fucking wall-wart taking up more than its fair share of space.

If they standardized the power supply, then you could build it into the wall in the same way we already have standardized high voltage AC power (well, standard for a particular region). In fact, there is enough room on most wall socket panels that you could add something similar to a USB connector on them.

Devices like modem routers though will always have a wall wart, unless you want them to be obscenely large and heavy.I don't see any real gain from the users point of view in having that bulk and weight in an extra box.

The real reason so much stuff uses wall warts is because it makes the regulatory compliance issues much easier/cheaper to deal with.

Now I can take my UK charger to America and still have to but a new adapter/charger!

Well I'm not sure your comment makes a lot of sense, since you can already take your UK based charger (240v, 50Hz) to America and plug it in the nearest wall socket (110v, 60Hz) with a travel adaptor and it will work just fine! This is not a new thing, nearly all PSU's produced in the last 10-15 years have been light switch mode voltage converters rather than the older transformers which were heavy and expensive to make..

My HTC charger comes with several separate pin configurations in the box. I just attach the correct one to the charger and off I go. Welcome to the 21st century. I don't need a different charger and I don't need to buy a travel adaptor.

I know that, but if you read my post I said that you'd have to buy an adapter or charger. Either way you'd still end up paying money. However I suppose if you brought a laptop (it's certainly the sort of thing I'd take to America) then you could charge using USB.

Frankly, after reading stories on slashdot, I wouldn't recommend you take a laptop to America anyway but if you did, how were you proposing to charge it without a travel adaptor? Its a different country and there is always going to be some expense

And how in the world are you going to recharge your laptop if you don't have an adapter ?

Btw.. power socket adapters cost like.99€ a piece (just don't buy them at the airport where they'll probably charge you 20€ for a crappy universal travel adapter).

If you're planning on traveling aboard, I suggest you look a bit ahead and buy a handful of those before you leave. And you don't have top throw them away.. you can use them the next time you go back.. 5€ investment for a lifetime of travel

Even better: don't buy the travel adapter for your laptop, but after arriving just ask your host if he has a local power cord lying around (and steal that from him for your next trip:-). Alternatively go to the local electronics store (or dollar store) and buy one, they're two to five bucks.

Which would be the same if you would travel from the UK to let's say Germany or France, all with different wall outlets.

I live in Canada and over the years I've built up a small collection of European power cords. My la

Not all phones will recharge this way without extra work. A co-worker and I just had a look at his new Blackberry, which refused to charge from his laptop unless proprietary software was also installed, and it refused to work with a discharged battery until at least 10 minutes after he first reconnected power and it had recharged the battery somewhat. Every other phone or portable device I've worked with worked _immediately_ after providing external power.

Standards are helpful, and I'd love to see a drop in the number of stupid adapters on the shelves of hardware stores and Staples, but amazingly stupid behavior like that Blackberry's can still be layered on top of good standards.

Oh, I'm sure the USB device _sends_ the juice: USB specs are well known and maximum voltages and currents cannot be normally exceeded with just software. No, the device is not _accepting_ the juice, probably as part of its need for quick-charge controller cleverness.

I think it's a problem with your computer. I have the first generation Sprint-branded Centro, and it begins charging immediately when I plug it in to any USB port. I've tried it on my (Windows) desktop, (Mac) laptop, a USB AC adapter for an iPod, and even a powered USB hub that wasn't actually plugged into a computer. It worked every time. Either the specific port(s) you're using have something wrong with them, your phone has something wrong with it, or maybe if you have it from a different provider it'

>>>A co-worker and I just had a look at his new Blackberry, which refused to charge from his laptop unless proprietary software was also installed,>>>

That's frakked up. The whole idea of the Universal (keyword) Serial Buss is to provde a non-proprietary interface and allow devices to retrieve power while connected. It might only be a trickle but it's enough to fill the battery on my iPod, my camcorder, my FM radio, my MP4 player, my external drive, and so on. I'm amazed your phone refus

But if it's a USB connector on the end, it will have to abide by that standard, since the spec says "maximum 5V, 500mA" and this universal connector can then be hooked up to your other device, that is not expecting a non standard voltage across those pins and dies when you plug it in.

The whole point about it being standard is that you can absolutely rely on the specification when you make a product that fits with it - wether that be the width of a rack mount unit, the voltage across 2 pins in a connector, o

But if it's a USB connector on the end, it will have to abide by that standard, since the spec says "maximum 5V, 500mA" and this universal connector can then be hooked up to your other device, that is not expecting a non standard voltage across those pins and dies when you plug it in.

The reason for that requirement is to specify that an USB device can demand at most 500mA of current from the port. So any normal USB device must work with that much, unless external power is provided.

As long as it is only 5V - continuing the rack mount analogy, greater current from the port is fine, that's like building the rack from a stronger material, but making the rack 19.5" wide so you can fit custom shock absorbers or some other reason breaks the spec irrevocably, requiring spacers for all standard 19" equipment now, or a potential divider between your PSU and device expecting 5V.

By using micro USB, they did paint themselves in a corner for the 5 volts. However, the current provided has to be a minimum of 500mA according to the USB specs.

Having a power adapter able to supply more than 500mA won't blow up anything since the device should also work within spec and work with a minimum of 500mA.

Chargers being able to supply 5 volts at 2A won't blow up anything and recharge devices four times faster, if required/supported by the device. If not, the device will only take 500mA and the charger just won't be working at its full capacity of 2A.

I wonder if the new phone charger standard mentions a "from 500mA up to X amps" specification or not.

My original post should have mentioned that only the voltage is a fixed requirement, as long as the minimum current is 500mA per port.

The USB spec defines that minimum current, just as defines a fixed 5V. The problem with such a small voltage is that you really extract a lot of energy, you have to ramp the current up if you want to power more thirsty devices.

It shouldn't affect mobile phones, but a laptop needs a little more juice - 5V at 2 amps isn't really going to cut it, 5 V at 5 amps might, but then yo

But *voltage* is important. I know that a device will only draw as much current as it needs, even if the PSU can deliver more, but if the device is expecting 5V across the pins and in reality it is 9V or 12V, then it has the potential to damage the device.

I don't think you understand electronics, you MUPPET, current is irrelevant (as long as the PSU can satisfy the demand of the device, ie available I > load I), if the voltage is wrong.

How is that fanboyism? The dock connector is physically small and carries a variety of signals, including power (at a higher level than USB requires), FireWire, composite view, audio, and RS-232 signals (possibly a few more I've forgotten). In what way is replacing this with a USB connector better?

My wife's new phone has a micro-USB port for the charger, but the only way to add data is via a micro-SD card.

My Motorola RAZR V3r is mini-usb, as well as my chi-pod and the digital camera that I use at work. One charger to rule them all, one charger to bind them.

With the seem editor and file manager in moto4lin I can tweak the RAZR as much as I want, as a result of which I have avoided getting a new phone for several years. Motorola doesn't make RAZR anymore, afaik.